Smart phones and other cellular devices are ubiquitous. People use these devices for both business and personal use. Many cellular devices include both voice call capabilities and data capabilities such as, for example, web browsing and e-mail. These services are generally billed to consumers in plans that may include a predetermined number of minutes, megabytes (MB) or gigabytes (GB) of data, and/or short messaging service (SMS, or text) messages.
Cellular devices can also be billed on a pre-pay or post-pay basis. As the name implies, pre-pay billing requires that the user buy a block of minutes and/or data in advance. When all (or nearly all) of the minutes or data is used, the user must purchase additional minutes and/or data. In some cases, the user may receive a text message or other notification that he is almost out of minutes and/or data. Post-pay customers, on the other hand, are billed for the minutes and/or data used during consecutive billing periods.
In existing solutions, a user's equipment (UE) and subscriber identity module (SIM) are not aware of any mobile subscriber attributes such as “prepaid” or “postpaid”, or “rate plan”. Current configurations are limited to, at most, the country mode (MCC) and network code (MNC) for a particular UE, which are related to the carrier for the UE not the subscriber. This makes it impossible to enforce any additional SIM locking rules based on subscriber specific attributes. In addition, any changes made on the billing side (such as switching account from prepaid to postpaid), for example, are not propagated down to the UE/SIM level; and thus, no control over these attributes is provided.